Overview:

After people, business data is many companies' most valuable resource.  What technology measures can organizations take to protect their data from common threats and risks, both internal and external?

Voice & Data Networks (VDN) helps organizations address the common security risks that can cause business to lose data, employee productivity, or both.

Corporate Firewalls/Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention

Did you check your front door this morning to make sure it was locked before you left for the office?

In a similar fashion, a corporate firewall acts as a gateway to your network, preventing unauthorized access to network resources and company data.  In a globalized economy where remote workers are increasingly common, IT departments have come to recognize that the ability to control external threats is not enough; employees in the field also need appropriate, high-performance access to the corporate network. 

Businesses have learned the hard way that external threats can come from anywhere, and the breaches have gained prominence in the minds of shareholders and customers.  A great example is the coordinated network attack on Google in 2010, which permanently altered Google’s approach to doing business in China.  Organizations in a regulated industry that fall under specific requirements such as HIPAA or PCI will have very specific requirements for protecting network data from unauthorized access.

• Enterprises that are seeking to take a proactive, aggressive approach to protecting themselves and their data from network intrusions will engage a trusted technology partner like VDN in designing and implementing a Firewall solution, and then performing Penetration Testing to identify and mitigate any remaining “holes” in the Network.

Anti-Spam/Anti-Malware/Anti-Virus

Wouldn’t it be great if the only risks to the security of the Network were outside the organization?

Unfortunately, companies have come to find that one of the most vulnerable points in any Network is internal employees.  Every day, PC and Mobile workers are exposed to malware, spyware, and viruses.  The complexity and sophistication of these exploits has grown tremendously, and even security-savvy employees can be fooled by malicious scripting on Web pages or images such as .jpegs.  Once an employee allows a security risk onto the corporate LAN, it can spread quickly and be extremely destructive to sensitive data. For example, on January 26^th, 2004, the Mydoom virus began spreading and at one point during the day accounted for 1-in-10 e-mail messages globally, and a 10% worldwide internet performance slowdown.

Spam, is generally considered a broad security risk due to the potential for a malicious payload as mentioned above, but more specifically for the potentially huge impact to corporate e-mail policies and storage, and employee productivity.  Enterprises with inadequate or incorrectly implemented spam filtering can see literally hundreds of spam e-mails per Exchange box per day.

• There are a number of Hardware (dedicated Appliance) and Software tools available to companies to properly address Spam, Malware, and Viruses.  VDN is a Corporate Partner of Cisco (Advanced Security Certification), SonicWall, and Microsoft, and VDN has found that an over-lapping, comprehensive approach to mitigating Spam and Viruses at the Gateway (on-firewall) and Endpoint (PC/Notebook) will usually be highly effective.  A pro-active approach to protecting against these types of security risks, while having a moderate initial or “up-front” cost for hardware and engineering, is almost ALWAYS less expensive than extensive mitigation, data recovery, and re-configuration after-the-fact.